Restoring a WordPress website from Wayback Machine

Restoring a WordPress website from Wayback Machine is possible but it can’t recover the whole site in the same way that a WordPress site backup can. There is a difference in the archive of both methods. In this article, we will explore; how a WordPress website can be archive from the Wayback Machine and a short touch to back up a WordPress site.

What is Wayback Machine?

In simple words, the Wayback Machine is a search engine like other search engines and a web spider. But unlike other search engines that return the answer to your queries, it returns the history of changes of a website that it has crawled from time to time.

If anyone wants to see the different versions of a site from different times; he needs to simply put the URL of the site in the Wayback Machine and it will show you a screen of different times that it has archived that particular site.

If you are curious to see how a website was 5 or 10 years ago, the Wayback Machine might have the specified version of your site. I have used the word “might” because of certain reasons.

As you know, the internet is a big place. The Wayback Machine has the capacity to store a lot of history of the internet. But there are limitations of it also. One of the main reasons is that your site is less popular. It crawls frequently popular sites while there is a chance that it crawls lesser-known sites less.

You can save your site to the Wayback Machine manually. You can do this by using the “Save Page Now” form available on the Home page of Wayback Machine.

Can I restore my site from Wayback Machine?

If you find your site on the web archive, what you see is the only front-end representation of the content of your site. The content is there but none of the plugins or theme settings are available on the web archive. You can restore the content available on the web archive in the form of HTML files.

Restoring the content from Wayback Machine depends on the condition; how your website’s content is on the web archive. If your aim is to the restoration of content only, you can copy, paste the content from the web archive and paste it to your current site.

The process becomes a bit longer if you don’t have a website available or starting with WordPress for the first time. The first thing is to have a WordPress site. For this purpose; you have to purchase a domain and hosting. Register the newly purchased domain of your choice at the hosting.

If you had an SEO plugin like Rank Math or Yoast in your archived website, you have to add these plugins manually to your site and do the SEO of your archived content again. Unfortunately, there is no way to get the data of a plugin from an archived site. This is only the front-end copy of the content that Wayback Machine keeps.

Backup of your site:

 

 

 

It is very important to keep a good backup of your site. Many plugins are available for taking the backup of your site. OnSiteWP has plans to include the offsite backup of your site. In case the server of your site crashed; you can have the backup of your site using the OnSiteWP plugin.

Summary:

The content available on the Wayback Machine has its own value. It can save you from rewriting the content that you had already written in the past. But it cannot be compared to a WordPress backup. In WordPress backup the theme and plugin settings of your site are also saved; the Wayback Machine doesn’t. Redundancy is key when disaster strikes.

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5 Ways to Archive a Website

There are several options available in the market to archive a website; 5 ways are worth knowing. These ways are solutions based on their relative difficulty. If you feel that none of these solutions are working for you; dive into finding the right solution for your needs and you will definitely find one.

There are 5 Ways to Archive a Website:

• Save a Single Page site to your local computer
• Use an online archive service like Wayback Machine
• Archive your WordPress site using DevKinsta
• Install the WAIL (Web Archiving Integration Layer)
• If you are comfortable using a command line, use Wget

Save a Single Page site to your local computer: 

This is the simplest and straightforward solution to your needs. If you need to archive a single page only, the functionality is already in practically every browser in the market.

To start this procedure, open a browser of your choice. Type the URL of the site that you want to archive. After the loading of the page, navigate to the File menu of the browser. There you will find the Save Page As option.

Click the option to save the page; the browser will show a dialog box. Here you need to choose the name of your page. You can type yourself or can save the default option that the browser is showing.

Here you have to make sure that you are saving the entire page. It will preserve the site with the most functionality possible. If you save it as just the HTML document, you will lose many functionalities of the page that you saved.

Use an online archive service like Wayback Machine:

None article or tutorial is complete for archiving a website unless you come to know the method of archiving your deleted or expired website from Wayback Machine. The process is super simple.

First, you need to open the official website of Wayback Machine http://wayback.archive.org/. You will see a search bar. Here you have to paste the URL of the site that you want to download. Here you paste the URL of the site that you want to archive.

Hit enter. Scroll down. You will see different snapshots of your site taken by the Wayback Machine. Hover on that date and click the snapshot time. It will show you the look of the site at that particular date taken by Wayback Machine.

Copy URL from the URL bar. Now go to a service provider that is offering the service to archive your site. Navigate to Pricing & Order Form. Here paste that link that you copied from Wayback Machine.

If you want to integrate this site into WordPress, you need to ask service providers to integrate it into WordPress. Provide web host C-Panel details or if you have installed WordPress yourself, provide us WP login details.

Archive your WordPress site using DevKinsta:

For the creation and deployment of the WordPress site, DevKinsta is an essential tool. It also helps you to archive your Kinsta-hosted website.

• In MyKinsta, you can create and download a backup.
• Import the content of your site and database also.

You can carry out search-and-replace on the database of your site. It will change the URL name from your live site to your new local archive. You can open your archived site at DevKinsta and use it as though it was live.

Install the WAIL (Web Archiving Integration Layer):

The first step in this method is to download and install WAIL. A dedicated installer for the WAIL tool is available. As the program is written in Python, it uses the PyInstaller module).

Installation is much easier. Regardless of any operating system, the following points are involved in the installation of WAIL.

• First of all, navigate to the site of WAIL.
• Download the appropriate installer for the operating system of your PC.
• You can unzip the file for the Windows version and can mount the DMG image for macOS.

For the macOS, there will be a resultant screen; you need to drag the app icon to your Application folder. For Windows users; the process is a bit different. Here you have to drag the unzipped folder to your root C:\ drive

Depending on the operating system of your PC, you can launch either WAIL.app or WAIL.exe.

Once WAIL is launched; you will see three options.

• View an archive
• Check the status of the archive
• Archive a website.

At the first launch, you may see nothing in your archives. Enter the URL of your site that you need to archive. Clink Archive Now button.

 

WAIL will begin to crawl your website. The status of the crawl can be checked on the advanced > Heritrix tab.

When you are done, there will be a “Success” message. Now click the View Archive button available on the Basic Tab. Your archive site will open in a browser. You can view all the archived content of your site here.

If you are comfortable using a command line, use Wget:

In this method of archiving a site, you need few things before starting:

• Command-line access to your computer
• A command-line tool like Windows Command Prompt, or on macOS and Linux there should be Terminal
• On your computer, there should be Wget installed.

It is likely to be installed on your operating system already. Using Wget is straightforward; once it is installed

wget "https://waybackdownloaders.com/" --warc-file="waybackdownloaders"

The above command line is used to download the site into index.html. You have to create a WARC file named waybackdownloaders.00000.warc.gz.

Wget is a very powerful tool. Many commands and options are available in it. You can make a complete mirror of your site using the –mirror command.

Summary (5 Ways to Archive a Website):

Fortunately, plenty of options are there to archive your site. However dedicated archiving tools are Wayback Machine, Heritrix, WAIL, and Wget. These are all robust solutions. These all offer standardized file formats to work.

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A Guide to Internet Archive Sites and Tools:

There are plenty of internet archive sites and tools available to archive a website. We will explore some of the popular ones to see which one suits your needs. Here are some;

• Wayback Machine
• Archive.today
• Heritrix
• WAIL – Web Archiving Integration Layer
• Stillio
• Pagefreezer

Let’s discuss different internet archiving sites and tools in detail.

Wayback Machine:

Wayback Machine is the first of its kind. It is a benchmark for other archiving tools and sites.

Wayback machine is a server-side archive solution. There are many ways to create and upload an archive. It is usually the first place to look while archiving a site. A dedicated API is also available to hook into its functionality.

Wayback Machine might not be able to preserve all the functionality of a site. This is because of the mechanism of its crawl and archive method of websites. Anyhow it is considered a standard benchmark for web archivists. It is free to boot.

Archive.today:

Archive. today is also an exciting free service. It is similar to the Wayback Machine in many ways, even in design but its approach to archive a website is different from Wayback Machine. The data servers of the archive. today are based in Europe.

Archive. today is not based on the crawlers running over the web. One sends with consent the URL of his site for inclusion in the archive. There is no robust deletion policy in this service. It excludes certain media and file types.

As it is free, it is more suitable if anyone wants a complimentary place to store the archive of his site. One of the awesome features is that it has search functionality to find previously internet archive sites.

Heritrix:

Internet Archive offers a few other archiving products aside from Wayback Machine. One of these is Heritrix. It is an open-source tool that was built in collaboration with Internet Archive sites and Nordic libraries.

Rather than a full-featured archiving tool, it’s a web crawler. All the crawled results can be packaged together through Heritrix.

Wayback Machine now uses Heritrix to crawl a site for the inclusion of that particular site on its own site. Heritrix is also used by a large number of libraries and institutions to build archives.

It has very impressive features but to install Heritrix, you must have some technical knowledge. To install it, there is not a user-friendly interface. You must have knowledge of Git, Github, and the command line.

Like other famous solutions, it is free to use. It is suitable for a cost-effective self-archiving solution.

WAIL – Web Archiving Integration Layer:

If you are going to use Heritrix to archive your site, but you are not having the required technical knowledge to simply install software, a potential solution is available for you.

WAIL is an open-source and free cross-platform desktop app that is having a functional Graphical User Interface, an installer is along with.

Heritrix is WAIL’s crawling engine. You can leverage the power of Heritrix while not having to traverse the command line and Github. Apart from this, WAIL uses the OpenWayback engine to replay web archives.

Stillio:

Stillio is an archiving tool; billed as an automated solution. It takes snapshots at set intervals. Stillio is a paid service and looks different from other archiving solutions.

It gives you an option to create an archive that exactly meets your requirements. You can add tags, titles, etc. to your URLs. You can also save your archives into Dropbox, Google Drive, and other third-party services like these.

One of the main drawbacks of Stillio is that it doesn’t support back-end archiving of your site. You are restricted to only snapshots of your site. There is no option for a full archive of data.

Stillio may be useful in certain cases like serving as brand management and tracking tool. For better SEO results and other such stuff; you can take screenshots of your competitors’ sites. For verification of content, it is also great.

As Stillio is a paid service, it starts at $29/month. The maximum price of it is $299. When there are free alternatives available, it is a huge amount for anyone to spend. It all depends on the need of your business.

Pagefreezer:

Pagefreezer is an automated tool to offer web archiving services. It has many same benefits as Stillio. But it is far better than Stillio as it also archives content from social media, text messages, full sites, and enterprise-level collaboration platforms.

Apparently, Pagefreezer looks better solution than Stillio as it has greater value in various use cases.

When you require a site with back-end functionality, Pagefreezer is the best solution. You can automate the number of snapshots. You can review these snapshots using the comparison tool and site archive browser.

In nutshell, Pagefreezer is a better enterprise-level solution for archiving a site.

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A dedicated backup & archive strategy is required to archive your website from Wayback Machine. Backups are essential for a site, remember, to preserve your site, there are some other ways also. You can archive a website in several flexible ways. All the ways to archive a website are user-friendly and easily accessible. It is up to you to pick the right solution according to your needs.

Here we will discuss some ways to archive a website. There are some prominent tools for archiving a site.

• An Introduction to Website Archiving
• Why Archive a Website
• Different Types of Archiving
• Where & How archives are stored

An Introduction to Website Archiving:

Preserving content, data, and media of a site for future reference is archiving a website. To see older versions of a website, there is a dedicated service Wayback Machine.

Technically, crawlers of Wayback Machine take the snapshots of any website from time to time, which constitutes the archive itself. A calendar is present on Wayback Machine showing the dates on which it has taken snapshots of your site. You can view each iteration in a timeline format.

To understand why Wayback Machine exists, we need to go back to the early 2000s. Many businesses were collapsing and their popular websites were either shut down or abandoned without leaving any memory behind.

Like other media formats, TV, and music, these abandoned or shut-down sites have nostalgic and historical value. It was important to give an idea to future users that how far technology earlier was.

To preserve websites, the Internet Archive launched Wayback Machine. You can have a look at the site to see how it has evolved over the years.

To archive a website, many crawlers involve. Some crawlers include huge individual crawls, it takes years to complete. In 2004, the first 100 Terabyte servers of Wayback Machine became operational. At the end of 2020, it has stored over 70 Petabytes of data. In Terabytes, it is more than 70,000.

Why archive a website?

To archive a website, there are plenty of reasons. For a real-world analogy, you can have a look at Github.

To store the repositories of a project, the developers use Github. It also stores every “commit” made. The commits are the snapshots only while repositories represent the whole website.

The archive is as much valuable as Git repositories. To influence the current design of your site, you can look at previous iterations of your site.

Archive of your site is valuable evidence if there is some sort of litigation. A complete and clear archive of a site can throw off disputes. You can present the archive of your site in front of courts also as evidence in any litigation.

Difference between data backup and web archive:

A site backup and website archive appear to be similar in general terms, but both have different jobs that complement each other.

• Backup is data-based: Preserving a site’s data at your own level is a backup of the site. If you want to restore your site, complete backup of your data is paramount.
• The archive preserves context over data: The functionality of a website’s archive is often patchy. In an archive, the design of a site and static content remain intact usually.

It is important to note that archiving a site doesn’t look to eschew data preservation effort. Undoubtedly, one of the main benefits of a web archive is letting users navigate your site as if it was live. Wayback Machine exists as a virtual “memory lane”. It keeps the visual intact. It takes higher priority than preserving backend functionality.

Data backups are used as daily protection of your site if something worst happens to the site. To understand the evolution of your site, archive a site is an additional way of help.

Different types of Archiving:

 

Contrary to the general conception, there are different types of web archiving. Let us break down.

There are three types of Web Archiving:

• Client-side: To save the version of a side, the client-side archive involves the end-user. Due to its simplicity and scalability, this type lets you archive the site with no fuss.
• Server-side: Wayback Machine and others are classified as server-side web archives. Wayback Machine uses crawlers and some sort of other technologies to archive a site. It requires a level of consent that we don’t find in the client-side type of archiving.
• Transaction-based: The base of it is server-side archiving. But as compared to server-side archiving, it is more complex. It requires explicit consent from the owner of the site. It archives the site transactions between server and end-user.

If a website is simple with static data, also having an organized archiving strategy, then client-side archiving is the best strategy. Most of the sites favor server-side archives. For most websites, transaction-based archiving is not necessary.

Where & How archives are stored:

A local archive is not a poor choice. But the drawback in this type of archive is that it disappears if there is a computer failure. On the other hand, if you opt for a third-party archiving solution, you have less control over what is archived.

So you need to adopt a multi-faceted approach to archive a site. What we suggest is that you treat the archive like backup; you need to have three different copies of a site at different locations and must have synchronization with each other.

You take the advantage of any server-side functionality to make the archive of your website. This will result in a robust backup of your side and archive strategy.

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